Are We On the Verge of a Pollen Manufacturing Boom?

The range of materials used in manufacturing looks very different now than it did a decade or two ago. It’s a lot easier to find bamboo used to make a host of items, from furniture to paper products; in 2019, luxury automaker Bentley noted that it was looking into a leather alternative made from grapes and other wine byproducts. Not every initiative pans out as planned — but when it does work, it makes for a fascinating case study in innovation and sustainability.

Which brings us to the rising popularity of pollen as a biomaterial. In an article for Knowable Magazine, Sandy Ong explored some efforts to use pollen as a raw material to make things like paper and sponges. These efforts, Ong reports, don’t entail using every part of pollen; instead, they would make use of its outer shell, which is very durable. A breakthrough came in 2020, when scientist Nam-Joon Cho and his colleagues came up with a way to heat pollen in a way that can make it much easier to manipulate.

Cho and his associates aren’t the only scientists exploring ways to use pollen to build other materials. In 2018, a group of researchers at Colorado State University received a $1.7 million grant from DARPA to explore ways of producing sporopollenin — the material used for pollen’s outer shell — in a lab. More recently, the journal Annual Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering published a paper which hailed “the transformative potential of plant pollen as it is converted into a variety of building blocks.”

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The bridge will connect Sicily and Calabria

Some obstacles remain in place before pollen becomes a ubiquitous building material, however. Knowable Magazine notes that the first part of converting pollen into a useful material involves removing certain components of it, including the parts of pollen that can trigger allergies. Paper made from pollen isn’t going to be terribly useful if it gives countless people using it an allergic reaction, after all. But if pollen can be used as a raw material in large quantities, it could be a big step forward for ecologists and engineers alike.

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